Re: No call for Ada (was Re: Announcing newscripting/prototypinglanguage)

["Alexander E. Kopilovich" <aek@VB1162.spb.edu>]

Randy Brukardt wrote:

>I saw a lot of
>companies with good, solid products (including us) get run over by companies
>with flashy marketing and barely functional products. What were they doing
>better?

They wern't doing better, they were doing differently. They targeted not
individual customers, but a kind of "virtual customer" - a weighted mixture
of real customers and their needs, which weren't always strictly relevant to
software or even any computing.

> It wasn't giving the customer anything real, but rather giving them
>the *illusion* of some benefit.

Yes, they were giving little to real (in common or material sense) customer,
but they were giving enough to that virtual customer (which transcripts as
illusion to real ones). And they succeeded because that virtual customer pays
much more than real individuals.

>That's what sells Java, Visual Basic, etc. today.

I think that although Java may be considered as NetBasic, nevertheless it is
a mistake to think of them as of essentially the same thing in this aspect.
Basic, as a language, was introduced and had their users long before Visual
Basic emerged. Then, Visual Basic was never presented with such a hype and
pressure; for example there weren't attempts to replace all programming
languages in CS courses with Visual Basic.

>So good software is doomed.

Well, not suprisingly, because "software" is a bad term and it was always
wrong to apply the adjective "good" to it. It is a program or system that
can be good, but not "software".



Alexander Kopilovich                      aek@vib.usr.pu.ru
Saint-Petersburg
Russia